


Prisoner 619B

by ConfessionForAnotherTime



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, M/M, Manipulation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-01
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-05-11 01:29:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5608612
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConfessionForAnotherTime/pseuds/ConfessionForAnotherTime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What could have happened to Wash if he hadn’t been given Church’s armor and gone with the Reds and Blues?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Prisoner 619B

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this post by keasbeyknights on their writing blog: http://prisoner619b.tumblr.com/post/129014204126/do-you-ever-think-about-how-if-tucker-didnt-think

Prisoner 619B. Wash stared down at the manacles around his wrists after he had been escorted back to the cell that he had learned to call home. After several escape attempts, the guards had grown wise to the ways to keep him down. The first attempt had resulted in his armor being taken away, plain clothes only offered to him. Apparently punching a guard so hard the man had to learn how to read again translated to having enhanced strength, something he was no longer allowed. Kept away from the others, Wash still got his four walls, three meals a day, and choice of solitary exercise or free time. Being kept at a maximum security UNSC prison wasn’t without its drawbacks.

Everyone knew his name. Everyone knew what he had done. _You’re the one who tried to get away. You’re the one who went crazy. You’re the one who worked with the Meta. You’re the---_ Wash stopped listening to them the moment they spoke, hurling insults and obscenities in order to be left alone at the start. He was initially in solitary just to ensure he wouldn’t run. When security eased up, he found himself as the victim of attacks, even if he was the one who came out on top at the end. Being a super soldier had its perks.

In his need to process how he had come to live in this jail cell, he planned his own revenge. The Reds and Blues had been so keen to take him in at first, helping him when it came to uniting those who knew about the crash, about Tex, about Omega. He took it as a form of abandonment, adding it to the long list of people who had turned their backs on him. It went back as far as Project Freelancer, being left behind when the _Mother of Invention_ initially crashed. North and South had been the last ones he had seen before the crash and the only ones that he knew returned after the ship had gone down. South only made it worse when she left him for the sake of ensuring the Meta didn’t come after her by leaving him for dead. He should have learned by now that trust was an illusion set out to tell people that hope still existed. Then he still had something.

Now? Now he had nothing. He had taken the offer in the first place to bring in the Epsilon unit with the former Agent Maine for the sake of buying his freedom. He could taste it with how close it was.

_“No matter what she's doing, or what she's trying to accomplish, just when her goal is within her reach, it gets yanked away. Every. Single. Time. Can you imagine what that's like?” Epsilon took a step back when the unit shook in the snow, rising up._

_“I think I’m getting the idea.” Wash mimicked his actions._

_“Uh oh.”_

Wash remembered the entire fight like it had just happened. The cold still got to him at times from all of the blows. Memory was the key. Epsilon was the key and that key had slipped from his grasp just when he had a way of getting out of this. He still remembered heading back to Hargrove, a failure, hands empty. He still remembered hanging his head and accepting Hargrove’s decision to keep him in confinement.

He didn’t ask for Epsilon and he still failed. It was his last ditch to get out of all this and here he was, still rotting away in a prison that cared nothing for him. He kept having flashes of memories, from his mother holding onto him and his half-sister, to his step-father’s depression, to research he didn’t remember making. Wash shook his head, pushing the thoughts away, always feeling strange when he saw himself through his mother’s eyes. She had been around until his fifth birthday, leaving him with his step-father and half-sister. When he learned the truth of where he came from, he couldn’t keep from resenting his mom for leaving him with a man who hated him for where he came from. He was plagued with her thoughts, his failures, her fuck-ups. He continued her grand tradition of making mistakes… Unable to ever measure up. Yet, he didn’t realize it until it was too late, when Church asked him.

“I have too much time to think,” he said to no one, dodging the plastic cup that was thrown at his cell bars from the prisoners who were allowed far more free time than him, and far more than they deserved. He hadn’t left his cell in weeks. He wasn’t really surprised when his outburst from leftover aspects of Epsilon leaving scars in his mind had triggered a reaction. Even if the program hadn’t been there since he laid on the operating table, he still felt him, digital fingers digging into his consciousness in a way that he could never really forget. _Washington. You know I’m never leaving._ The hardest part of meeting Churc--- Epsilon was how much he was thriving without him. Even as a fragment, the AI was still more whole than he could ever be since the two of them had been separated. Wash didn’t want him back though.

“Hey, 619, get up. I would say pack your stuff, but you aren’t going to miss anything from here. Come on. Hands through the-- oh right. You’re still being punished for the incident.” The guard grinned. “Such a shame for you.”

“It wasn’t my fault. You saw me when the---” Wash started, holding his manacled hands through the bars to show he wasn’t a threat.

“I don’t want to hear it, 619. Come on.” The guard took him roughly by the arm when he was given the signal that all the other prisoners were safely put away to bring Wash out.

“Where are we---ooph!” Wash doubled over as he walked when the guard hit him in the gut.

“I told you I don’t want to hear it!” A guard came from behind, hearing the first guard and struck Wash from behind, just below the site of his neural implants. The second guard took him by the other arm when Wash collapsed from the blow, groaning a few moments later when his momentary unconsciousness ended. Wash stumbled the last few steps into the room, where the guards let him fall to the floor. He hit his head again, cutting his eyebrow open on the cold, metal floor of the prison compound. He groaned some more, hands more or less trapped under him in the manacles that still bound him.

“David. So good to see you again. Would you like to take a seat?”

Wash pushed himself up with his fingertips when the guards helped pull him up, manhandling him and pushing him into the seat immediately to his right. The blood streamed down his face and dripped to the floor.

“Should I be surprised you’re here?” Wash asked, looking at either of the armed guards to his sides. “Or do you just enjoy making me miserable, Counselor?” Wash grunted when the baton of the guard to his right collided with his jaw in an attempt to correct his tone.

“Please, David, call me Aiden.”

“The same applies to you as to… him. You gave me my new name, so use it. There are a lot of things I want to call you, but your name isn’t one of them. You’re one of the reasons I’m here in this mess. You’re part of my problem. I should be--” Wash yelped in pain when the butt of the guard’s rifle connected with the side of his head.

“That’s enough of that. Now. I’m certain that you don’t want to be here any longer that you have to. Hargrove gave you an opportunity to redeem yourself. Since you failed, I don’t see why I should bother giving you a second chance on top of it.” Aiden smiled softly, walking around the table where Wash was sat. Wash watched him, blinking blood out of his eye from his still trickling eyebrow. “However, I know you’re ambitious. It was part of the reason why you were chosen for Project Freelancer in the first place, was it not? So tell me, what can you do for me?” Aiden leaned in, grabbing Wash’s chin to make him look directly into his eyes. “What can you do for _me_ , Agent Washington? In what way are you still useful?”

Wash swallowed down the sick feeling in his throat, swallowed down the bile that rose when he let his face go, taking a step back and waited for an answer.

“Well, _sir_ , I can think of something I already know you like.”

\---

The feeling of shame when Wash swallowed down the last shred of his pride, washing it down with the remains of his dignity left a salty aftertaste in his mouth. _Oh shut up. Don’t even call it that, you know what you did._

Wash moved to sit in the chair across from the desk that Aiden was still sitting at, ignoring the sounds of the other man making himself presentable again.

“Now, Agent Washington, in regards to your freedom, there are a few questions I need to ask. Where is the Epsilon unit?” Aiden tented his hands over his lap, looking over to Wash’s file in front of him.

“I don’t know why you’re asking me. You took it with you. You have it. So you know what, go ask your people in evidence what you did with it.” Wash spat out his words, still trying to rid his mouth of the taste of regret.

“Well, the unit itself came with us, but we had no way of verifying its contents, since both you and Agent Maine---”

“Don’t call him that,” Wash growled.

“Fine-- the Meta, managed to not bring it in a verifiable condition. You have given me no reason to trust you, so why should I do so now?”

Wash’s eye twitched. After what he just did, why would he--? Wash growled again, kicking the desk in front of him, prompting a guard at the back of the room to raise his weapon. Aiden waved his hand.

“He’s no danger to me right now. You have been kept alive for one main reason: you know the red and blue soldiers and you might know where they have gone with the unit. Whether they possess the AI or not, we want them brought in because overall, they have information that can be useful to the tests that would tell us how this AI behaves in the field.” A smile spread across Aiden’s face.

“Behaves in the field? I can fucking tell you that. It goes fucking nuts. It absorbs the memories of others until it acts exactly like you want it to. He’ll make you think he’s exactly who you want him to be until he leaves you high and fucking dry to take the blame because he thinks he’s a copy of the Alpha.”

“You sound bitter.”

“You’re goddamned right I’m bitter. I was told I would be free of this if the unit came in. No conditions. Now, I’m still cuffed. I’m still here. I’m still be treated like I’m a criminal when all I’ve been doing up until this point is my fucking job, so you know what, yeah, I’m a little fucking bitter.”

Aiden smiled again, writing down the exact reactions he was getting from the ex-freelancer in front of him.

“Well, you said you would do anything for your freedom, and I’m wanting to make you an offer.”

“I don’t want your fucking offer. You’re just going to yank it out from under me, just like you did this time.” Wash curled his lip in disgust.

“That was Hargrove. This is me. All I want you to do is track the red and blue soldiers. Bring them in. Find our AI. I will require all of them for this to work though. I don’t want any chances of anything getting out any more than it already has.”

Wash sighed heavily, keeping his composure otherwise.

“I bring them in and you let me go? Do you want them alive?” Wash spat on the ground. Aiden’s smile disappeared.

“If you can.”

 


End file.
